Pressure Mounts as New Glenn Nears Launch Date

2024 is already shaping up to be a fantastic year for new launch vehicles. Should all go to plan, 2024 will see multiple flights of ULA’s Vulcan Centaur, MHI and JAXA’s H3, and ArianeSpace and ESA’s Ariane 6; not to mention the year has already seen multiple flights for SpaceX’s Starship-Super Heavy. However, 2024 is far from over and another new rocket is still expected to earn its wings: Blue Origin’s New Glenn.

If all proceeds according to plan it could happen in less than 60 days. However, substantial milestones remain incomplete, raising questions on the rocket’s readiness.

The Mission

New Glenn is Blue Origin’s first orbital-class launch vehicle; in terms of capability, New Glenn is a fairly ambitious leap for the company. Blue Origin’s actively flying vehicle, New Shepard, is a fully-reusable suborbital booster and capsule capable of carrying cargo and passengers to the edge of space and back. New Glenn, meanwhile, is a partially reusable orbital launch vehicle, which from its base to the tip of its fairing measures 321 feet tall – only a single foot shorter than NASA’s SLS Block 1. Should New Glenn launch this year, it will become the largest commercially developed and operated launch vehicle to launch out of Cape Canaveral (until SpaceX’s Starship eventually begins Florida operations).

On liftoff from LC-36, New Glenn will be propelled by a cluster of seven of Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines on New Glenn’s first stage. BE-4 has already been flight-qualified, as ULA buys engines from Blue Origin to power the first stage of their Vulcan Centaur rocket, which flew for the first time in January of this year. Following the separation of the first stage, two BE-3U engines (a variant of the engine already flown on New Shepard) will light and carry the payload to space. Meanwhile, the first stage will fall back to Earth and, under the power of a single engine, land on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean.

New Glenn’s first launch will carry NASA’s EscaPADE mission, a pair of small Mars orbiters built to explore the magnetosphere and atmosphere of Mars while investigating their interactions with the solar wind. Currently, the mission is expected to launch no earlier than September 29th, 2024. 

While there is schedule risk associated with assigning a payload to the inaugural launch of a new lifter, EscaPADE’s nature allows some leeway. The twin EscaPADE probes are small, a fraction of the weight and volume offered by New Glenn. EscaPADE additionally has a unique performance goal to depart for Mars under their own power, to demonstrate the capabilities of the RocketLab-built spacecraft for potential future missions. However, because EscaPADE does not use the full performance capacity of the New Glenn launch vehicle, that additional performance can be leveraged to launch EscaPADE on higher-energy out-of-window trajectories to Mars. It was stated at the 30th Meeting of the Small Bodies Research Assessment Group earlier this year that backup launch options into 2025 were being actively considered by the mission team. No such delay has been announced yet, however, and EscaPADE remains targeting a late September launch.

The Test Campaign (So Far)

New Glenn’s preflight testing campaign has arguably been ongoing for many years, with the first static fire of a full BE-4 engine dating all the way back to October of 2017. However, the testing campaign has ramped significantly in the last year. In August of 2023, Blue Origin began their first engine tests on Test Stand 4670, as first reported by Space Scout. Activity at the Huntsville facility has not slowed since; with engine production increasing dramatically as Blue Origin prepared to support the launch campaigns of both Vulcan and New Glenn, the need to test and qualify more engines grew to match.

To begin seeing New Glenn itself, followers of the spaceflight industry would only have to wait until December of last year, when Blue Origin rolled what is now known to be complete flight tankage for the first New Glenn booster between buildings at their Merritt Island factory. This tankage, which on a full booster is sandwiched between a “forward” interstage module and “aft” engine module, is referred to by Blue Origin as the “mid” module. A month later, in January of 2024, the tankage would reveal itself again, this time integrated with pathfinder hardware representing the forward and aft modules of a full stage. This so-called “flight-like pathfinder” was rolled to the Horizontal Integration Facility at Blue Origin’s LC-36 pad for testing. In February a second, older and much more barebones simulator performed a series of fitchecks for both the Transporter/Erector and GSE at LC-36, the flight-like pathfinder was integrated with hardware representing the second stage and fairing of New Glenn. The full pathfinder stack performed an additional series of fit testing and GSE tests at LC-36 in late February where nitrogen was pumped through the tankage to verify pad-to-vehicle connections.

Following these tests, the flight-like pathfinder was returned to Blue Origin’s factory, and while the tests had been officially acknowledged, the only future tests publicly mentioned were that static firings would occur at LC-36 over the summertime. As of writing, these static fires have not yet occurred.

In May of 2024, after a period of silence, the barebones simulator was once again rolled out to the launch pad, and underwent several raising and lowering operations. The specific goal of these operations was never stated, but the simulator remained on the pad (whether horizontal or vertical) for nearly two months. During the launch of Starliner’s Crewed Flight Test, another piece of New Glenn hardware was spotted at LC-36, this time an aft section sitting on a smaller stand on the LC-36 complex. On the first of July, Blue Origin tested the “rapid retract system” which pulls the transporter/erector away from the vehicle just before launch, and the New Glenn simulator was left free-standing for the first time.

Recently, on July 17th, Blue Origin showed off the previously spotted aft module performing an extension test of its six landing legs. In a series of posts on the website formerly known as Twitter, Blue Origin CEO David Limp specified that the aft module seen was indeed flight hardware, and explained that “each leg can support over 150 tons of impact at touchdown, roughly the weight of two fully loaded 737 aircraft.” On July 25th, a complete forward module was transported to LC-36, and subsequently performed tests of its four control surfaces and its reaction control thrusters. Both  systems are involved in attitude control for the New Glenn booster during both ascent and descent. The aft and forward modules were unpainted, showing off a bronze-silver thermal protection system (which Blue Origin internally refers to as “comet”). It is unclear what the timeline to integrate and test the complete first stage booster looks like; however, the forward module returned to Blue Origin’s factory on August 7th, likely marking the beginning of the booster’s final integration.

No longer needed at LC-36, the New Glenn simulator was delivered to Blue Origin’s Port Canaveral facility on August 1st. On the morning of August 8th, the simulator was raised vertically, standing beside the recently recovered Falcon 9 booster which launched the Cygnus NG-21 mission. The next phase for Blue Origin’s recovery rehearsal at Port Canaveral will be to load the simulator onto their landing barge, named Landing Platform Vessel 1 (LPV1), which began its journey to Florida from Brest, France that same day. LPV1 is expected to arrive around August 27th.

On the morning of August 8th, a New Glenn upper stage was spotted outside of Blue Origin’s factory at Merritt Island, which was then transported to LC-36. David Limp confirmed on X, formerly Twitter, that the spotted stage was complete and indeed slated for New Glenn’s first flight.

It has been announced that EscaPADE will be delivered to the Astrotech Payload Processing Facility in Titusville on the 11th of August, little over a week away from time of writing. If Blue Origin intends to hit the mission’s launch window, the clock is ticking to assemble New Glenn and perform the rocket’s first integrated preflight test campaign. Additionally: while the FAA has signed off on New Glenn’s preflight test campaign, the federal agency has not yet cleared New Glenn for launch. It is unclear where Blue Origin is in the process of licensing their inaugural orbital flight, and the licensing of their full annual operations from LC-36.

What Does New Glenn Offer?

Taken as a whole, New Glenn can be easily compared to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which implements a similar reuse strategy. There are, however, key design and operational differences with New Glenn that yield alluring prospects, the most obvious being the difference in scale. New Glenn aims to carry significant mass into space, 45 metric tons to Low Earth Orbit or 13 metric tons to Geostationary Transfer Orbit, while providing a voluminous seven-meter diameter fairing. 

To put that performance into perspective, the Falcon-family’s most demanding payload awarded to date is for the launch of the Gateway Co-Manifested Vehicle (CMV), the first two modules of NASA’s Lunar Gateway station. Falcon Heavy only has to loft the Gateway CMV into a moderately high Earth orbit; the rest of CMV’s journey to the Moon is completed under the power of its own ion engines. To launch the lunar station, Falcon Heavy will require a special extended fairing to accommodate the CMV’s size, and it was recently announced that carrying CMV will require Falcon Heavy to fly in a fully expendable configuration. The Gateway CMV’s current estimated weight is 19,347 kg according to a recent GAO report. This means an unmodified New Glenn rocket would be able to comfortably launch NASA’s Gateway CMV, all while still recovering its booster.

This payload performance is not without its own drawbacks, of course. While Blue Origin has expressed no interest in an expendable variant of New Glenn’s first stage, to maximize performance the booster does not perform a boost-back burn as Falcon does. Less energy spent on slowing the booster down means more energy can be imparted onto the upper stage for payload delivery, but does mean the booster lands further downrange than Falcon 9. New Glenn may experience a longer trip back to land after it flies, which means more possible downtime between flights. 

New Glenn’s other major strength is its simplicity: only one booster and one upper stage, with a combined total of nine engines. Compare this to the three boosters and 28 engines of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, a vehicle which SpaceX Founder and CEO Elon Musk described in a tweet as “scary” for the amount of state changes the lifter experiences during launch. New Glenn also employs methalox as the fuel of choice for its first stage, a fuel pursued by many modern launch vehicle programs, including ULA’s Vulcan Centaur and SpaceX’s Starship-Super Heavy. Methane propellant has three major advantages that make it an appealing choice; methane is cost-effective, easily storable, and quite importantly, methalox burns clean. This avoids the need to clean out engines to ensure they are ready for reflight, which decreases the amount of time needed to ready a stage to fly again.

Blue Origin’s initial model for New Glenn’s flight rate is a regular, monthly cadence, maintained by a fleet of four boosters, all launching out of LC-36. In order to account for inclement weather, Blue Origin claims they’ll have the capacity to “surge” New Glenn’s flight rate to either three launches in a single month, or eight launches across four months, to make up for lost launch windows. New Glenn’s operational cadence may change as the launch vehicle becomes flight proven or as additional launch sites come online. While a second pad has not been officially declared by Blue Origin, documents were found in the public record of the California Coastal Commission by a Reddit user which suggest Blue Origin is seeking permission to construct a New Glenn launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base’s SLC-9 which would add an additional 8 launches to the vehicle’s yearly cadence. While New Glenn is not aiming to compete with or match the flight rate at which SpaceX operates Falcon 9, for a rocket that punches above the Falcon 9 payload class, 12 to 20 annual launches opens new opportunities on previously infrequent heavier-side of the American launch market. Falcon 9 has flown a few hundreds times, but Falcon Heavy has only launched ten times to date; a number Blue Origin hopes to exceed with New Glenn in a typical operating year. To make full usage of the routine high-mass launch capability, the vehicle offers options for manifesting multiple payloads, including Blue Origin’s recently announced Blue Ring spacecraft which is designed to deliver multiple payloads to different orbits.

Of course, for New Glenn the timeline to reaching full operational cadence is unclear. Whether or not the new vehicle will offer competitive space access in practice when weighed against SpaceX’s Falcon family will have to be demonstrated. The gap between promises and action is not impenetrable, but still has to be crossed.

In terms of future commitments, New Glenn is the launch vehicle of choice for both Blue Moon MK1 and MK2, Blue Origin’s cargo and crewed Moon landers aiming to support NASA’s Artemis Program. New Glenn is also the vehicle expected to launch the modules which make up Orbital Reef, a commercial space station being developed by Blue Origin, Sierra Space, and Boeing. New Glenn entering operation in the near future reduces schedule risk for these programs, and provides Blue Origin the means to begin executing on their various plans for commercial space access. The Department of Defense has shown significant interest in Blue Origin’s premiere launcher, and has on-boarded the lifter into its National Security Space Launch Program. A requirement for the NSSL award was a credible path to launch New Glenn no later than December of 2024, which suggests confidence from both Blue Origin and the DoD that the rocket is on-schedule.

Closing Thoughts

When written all out, Blue Origin’s New Glenn sounds well-poised to become a staple of the modern launch ecosystem. However, the company will face a significant challenge in the transition from development to operation: establishing a reputation.

Unlike SpaceX or ULA, Blue Origin has never operated an orbital launch service prior to New Glenn. While Vulcan and Starship can point back to the Atlas V, Delta IV, and Falcon 9 programs which preceded them as evidence of their competency as launch providers, Blue Origin only has New Shepard. Until it launches, New Glenn is only as good as Blue Origin’s word, which results in hesitancy from potential customers. Blue Origin has, somewhat infamously, kept their cards close to their chest and has been very selective about sharing information regarding their various development programs. As the countdown to launch nears, the pressure will be on for Blue Origin to maintain schedule as they complete their first preflight test campaign and launch EscaPADE in a timely manner. In the current budget environment, setbacks to NASA’s science missions are risky. Hypothetically, a substantial delay to EscaPADE’s launch date could place the mission in jeopardy, and it seems New Glenn finds itself as the long pole to flight-readiness.

Most of all, the pressure will be on Blue Origin to introduce themselves to the global launch landscape, and make sure the introduction is a good one.